Converts are often asked to tell their stories. There are good reasons for telling them as well as a few bad ones. I am telling mine now to challenge the reader to recognize the necessity of ongoing conversion in his own life.
I don’t want my story to be used against the denomination that I converted from. I don’t want my story to leave the impression that my life is filled with past glories but no present ones. And most of all, I don’t want the reader to assume that the greatest interior drama of Christian life belongs to converts.
In fact, we are badly in need of a body of literature about the “reverts” who have struggled heroically through the confusion of the modern Church to find firm footing on our sacred deposit.
My first conversion was a conversion to the love of Christ, pure and simple. I was a nineteen-year-old junior at the University of Texas studying philosophy. My world consisted of reading Plato in the midst of hippies, the emerging drug culture, and the victorious Texas Longhorn football team. Like all teenagers entering adult life, I thirsted for the bonds of genuine fellowship to make up for the kind of disappointments all of us experience in family life. I found this fellowship in a Southern Baptist Church.
When I walked the aisle of Ridglea West Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, I did it for the promise of grace and forgiveness. Forgiveness meant that I could make a fresh start, and the promise of grace meant that I would be given the power to look beyond my own concerns and actively will the good of others.
I believed this because all of the years I spent in the community of Baptists, I consistently met people who worked sacrificially for others. Their church services were nothing less than celebrations of the shared concern and good feeling that Baptist piety, at its best, engendered among them.
When I became president of the Baptist Student Union at the University of Texas-Austin, I began to confront an ethos that would eventually cause me to look elsewhere in the Christian tradition for a spiritual home. The fact that I studied philosophy was itself, to some Baptists, a reason to doubt my sincerity regarding Christ. Baptists after all, I was told, are the “people of the Book.” I was told that everything I would need to know about life, morality, theology, and even some science was to be found in the revealed word. I was warned against becoming “puffed up” with the pride of human wisdom.
I took these warnings seriously, but something seemed wrong about a religious outlook that excluded all the world’s greatest writers and artists from the conversation about truth. Indeed, as I read the history of philosophy—especially Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant—I kept discovering deep affinities in the Western intellectual tradition with the Christian worldview that I was learning through regular Scripture study. In other words, without knowing its standing in the Catholic tradition, I was g.asping the harmony of faith and reason taught by the Church.
I never disputed the fact that Scripture should receive pride of place in the hierarchy of wisdom, or that a thorough grounding in biblical interpretation should be passed over in favor of the tradition of great books. But when I argued for the benefit of such a synthesis I was dismissed as someone who was playing with fire and was about to be burned.
I chose to attend Princeton Theological Seminary instead of a Southern Baptist seminary because the Princeton curriculum included courses in philosophy, the history of doctrine, and the arts. While attending Princeton I founded the Baptist Student Union and tried in vain to start a mission church in central New Jersey. I was licensed to preach and became active among Southern Baptists in the New York–New Jersey area.
Princeton Eye-Openers
There were several defining moments during my three years at Princeton that made me question being a Southern Baptist and that opened the door to the Catholic Church. The first of these was an invitation to lead a seminar on theology in film for Southern Baptist college students in Ridgecrest, North Carolina. I chose four films I considered the most pertinent to theological consideration at that time: Last Tango in Paris, A Clockwork Orange, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Fiddler on the Roof.
Bear in mind, I did not show the films—I merely announced that I was going to discuss them. I expected a group of fifty students, but when I walked in the room there were hundreds. On the front row sat eight scowling young men with Bibles open on their laps. It was clear they were not there to enjoy the discussion, but rather to put me in my place for daring to speak openly about movies that contained sexually explicit material.
My Princeton students took me aside before the first lecture and told me not to worry, because if things got rough they were going to act as my bodyguards. The discussion was, you might say, lively. No punches were thrown, but I was told in clear terms that I had introduced a Satanic influence into a spiritual retreat.
Later that night the national president of Baptist Student Ministries took me aside to tell me that a group of students were fasting and praying that my influence would not corrupt the students in my seminar. He asked if there were other movies I could discuss. I told him that since I was merely talking about the movies and not showing them, I didn’t understand the outrage. He explained to me that the core of the problem was that I had seen the movies—how could I have made myself vulnerable to these kinds of dangerous images? I told him that thus far I had avoided imitating Marlon Brando and Malcolm McDowell and that it was a safe bet that I would not do so in the future.
The next day an even larger group greeted me. This time one of my Bible-wielding critics brought his son in the hope that his presence would keep me from discussing A Clockwork Orange. That session nearly did get physical. As I drove back to Princeton from Ridgecrest, it occurred to me that whatever career I might have looked forward to among Southern Baptists was in serious jeopardy.
The next semester I signed up for a reading course on the theology of Augustine with Dr. Karlfried Froelich, one of the finest teachers of anything I have ever encountered. The only requirement he gave me for the course was to read as many of Augustine’s books as I could. He explained that most people only read The Confessions and never encounter the richness of Augustine’s other treatises, letters, sermons, commentaries, and writings against the heretics. He added, “Don’t worry about trying to read all of Augustine. No one has ever done that.”
I started with Augustine’s On the Trinity. It was one of those reading experiences that stay with you. It was akin to what I saw in my first reading of Plato’s Dialogues: a totally original mind whose g.asp of ideas and intellectual traditions and argument is cumulatively overwhelming. What particularly impressed me was that a theologian could successfully integrate history with biblical interpretation, philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, and experience.
What I came to see only later was that Augustine’s capacity for synthesis was based upon his grounding in the metaphysical tradition of classical Greece and Rome. In other words, Augustine possessed an intellectual framework that enabled him to mediate different sciences and truth claims into a coherent Christian perspective. In short, I found in Augustine an example of the synthesis of faith and reason that I had struggled to defend while an undergraduate at the University of Texas.
I knew nothing about the Catholic Church at that time in my life. If someone had given me a test on the nature of the Catholic Church—its priesthood, sacraments, or its history—I would have flunked. I had never even met a Catholic priest. But that was to be remedied shortly. The following semester I took a course in theology and literature from Fr. William F. Lynch, S.J. I must confess that during the first class I felt somewhat uneasy about sitting in a class led by a man in a Roman Catholic collar.
But once Fr. Lynch started speaking I knew that my experience of reading Augustine’s On the Trinity was no fluke. Lynch had recently directed Oedipus Rex on stage, and he talked about how he lighted the stage when Jocasta realizes that she has married her son Oedipus. Lynch placed the spotlight on her face leaving all the speaking characters in the darkness. The audience he said should see the horror of her realization rather than focus on the words of the dialogue.
That lecture hit me hard because Fr. Lynch focused on what is seen over what is heard. As a Baptist I had been trained to concentrate all my energy on the spoken word. Lynch seemed to be saying that presence comes first; that the reality of the person and the truth that the person comprehends can be communicated more effectively to the eyes than to the ears. For me this was my first realization of the meaning of sacrament and the reality of Real Presence. Obviously, this realization was oblique, but conversion consists of moments like this when God speaks through events that seem remote from the teaching of doctrine.
A few weeks later, Fr. Lynch became ill and had could no longer travel from New York City down to Princeton for his weekly lectures. So I went to see him. I visited him in his room at St. Ignatius thinking I would find book-lined rooms with artistic bric-a-brac lying about on the floors and tables. What I found stunned and delighted me: His room was bare, nothing adorned the walls except a crucifix above his bed where he was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. There it was again: the harmony of faith and culture, and all embodied in the life of this sickly, diminutive man who struggled to greet me.
Out of Place in Two Worlds
When I arrived at Emory University for doctoral studies in theology and literature, the first person I met at Emory was a Cuban-American graduate student named Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis who is now a scholar of some repute at the University of San Francisco. I asked Erasmo at the new student reception how he would describe himself. He told me “Christian humanist,” to which I replied, “Oh, ‘Christian’ is not good enough?” Rather than taking offense at the insolence of a young grad student, he smiled and said something to the effect that it was good to hear someone speak so forthrightly of the faith.
Through Erasmo I was introduced to the greats of Catholic culture: the novelists—Evelyn Waugh, Julien Green, Graham Green, George Bernanos; the poets—Dante, Baudelaire, Rilke; the theologians—de Lubac, von Balthasar, Congar, Bouyer, and Danielou. More importantly, perhaps, Erasmo, who had been a Trappist novice, introduced me to monastic spirituality.
Catholicism was, however, only an object of intellectual curiosity for me. Still trying to make it as a Southern Baptist minister, I took a job as an associate minister at the venerable Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. I met many wise and wonderful people at Druid Hills but began banging my head once again against the Baptist contempt for culture. For example, in addition to holding weekly Bible studies I began to have film nights where I showed films like Billy Budd and To Kill a Mockingbird. Complaints started flowing into the pastor from parents about how the youth minister was wasting their children’s time.
So I found myself out of place in two very different worlds. At Emory most viewed me as hopelessly backward—I was the Baptist from Texas trying to make sense of the theological dimensions of literature without losing the primacy of revealed truth. On the other hand, at Druid Hills I was the young, arrogant Princeton graduate who didn’t want to stay within the boundaries of sola scriptura.
Fortunately, my dissertation committee was made up of three men who, each in their own way, applauded my determination to uncover the linkages between the Christian faith and culture. Dr. David Hessler, my advisor, the son of a Lutheran minister and a practicing Episcopalian, showed me the ways of Aristotle’s Poetics as the key to discerning the moral content of great literature. Dr. Arthur Evans, a devout Catholic who had taught at Notre Dame University, often invited me to sit in his backyard, drink tea, and discuss the spirituality of poets and novelists. Dr. Don Saliers, a Methodist theologian, introduced me to the liturgical understanding of both theology and literature.
Thus it was no great surprise when I chose a theologian, a poet, and a philosopher— namely, Kierkegaard, Baudlelaire, and Nietzsche—for my dissertation on anti-romanticism. My dissertation, in retrospect, was my attempt using Protestant assumptions to overcome the barriers between faith and culture. Instead of overcoming the barrier I reached a dead end. I didn’t know it was a dead end at the time, but later on when I began reading Thomas Aquinas seriously, the inadequacy of my methodology became clear.
After I received my doctorate in 1979, my first job offer came from Metropolitan Baptist Church, then the only Southern Baptist church in New York City. When I went to “preach” in view of a call, I chose as my sermon text the short story by Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard To Find.” I thought the literary angle would appeal to cosmopolitan Baptists of the Big Apple.
I noticed as I was preaching that my congregation seemed rather perplexed. Their faces grew even more quizzical when I finished my sermon by emphasizing the famous scene at the end of the story when the misfit shoots the grandmother and says, “She would have been a good woman if someone had shot her every day of her life.” My gloss on that text seemed as obvious then to me as it does now— that all of us become better people when we face the fact of our own mortality. When nobody came down the aisle during the invitation, I assumed my audition was a flop.
Later that night in my room at the Edison Hotel across from Lincoln Center the phone rang, and the chairman of the search committee—much to my surprise—offered me the job. I asked him if I could sleep on it. That night, with the sound of the elevator keeping me awake, I realized I could not in good conscience accept, because, intellectually at least, I had become a Catholic. I went back to Atlanta with no prospects for another job.
The Baptists had not given up on me yet. I received a call from the dean of Mercer University in Atlanta asking me if I would like to teach humanities courses to inmates at the state and federal penitentiaries there. I spent the next year teaching ethics, religion, literature, and music appreciation inside barbed wired fences and cellblocks. There was no better place in the world for me to learn the art and the grandeur of being a teacher.
Redbird Epiphany
In the spring of that year I felt the need to start studying something entirely different. I perused my bookshelves for a title as yet unread and came across a paperback book containing the first question of the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas. I took it out in the backyard along with a chair and sat under a tree and began reading. At first I got Aquinas’s meaning backward because I didn’t understand the structure of his articles. Once I got this turned around, I started reading quickly through the arguments.
I came to the article posing the question whether everything that exists is good. This question particularly intrigued me, in part because it bears upon the personal matter of my own moral status before God. To put it simply, if a person is sinful and evil is he in some way still good? As I read Aquinas’s reply to the effect that everything that exists is good because God who is supremely good created it, I stopped reading and looked up. At that moment a redbird sitting in a birdfeeder above my head began to sing, and the words “everything that exists is good” seemed to unite themselves with the bird’s song. The song seemed to represent both the fact of God’s creative act and its import, namely that nothing can be so damaged that its goodness can be completely removed from it. I knew then that it was time to meet with a priest.
Erasmo came to my aide once again by introducing me to Fr. Richard Lopez. Fr. Lopez and I began a series of regular weekly luncheon meetings that lasted for a period of two years. Since I had no inkling of the nuts and bolts of Catholic practice, its liturgy, or its ecclesiology, he was faced with the large task of making me get out of the clouds of metaphysical abstraction and put my feet on more solid ground.
My first forays into a Catholic Mass were somewhat distressing. I didn’t like the sermons or the hymn singing, if you could even call it singing. The order of Mass printed in the missal was incomprehensible. Everyone else seemed to know what was going on while I flipped the pages of the missal furiously.
In all of this confusion there were two things I really liked, and they would keep me coming back to Mass until I started understanding the routine: I liked crossing myself, and I liked kneeling. The motions of the body in Catholic worship seemed to help me pray and to adore in a way I had never done before.
Fr. Lopez also began to answer predictable questions I had regarding the nature of authority, the priesthood, the pope, the Virgin Mary, and the sacraments. The Catholic ban on birth control was something I already understood and agreed with. I had little difficulty in seeing the superiority of these basic tenets of the Catholic faith given my experience as a Southern Baptist. Under Fr. Lopez’s guidance I came to see the Catholic Church as the fullest representation of God’s revelation to man as contained in Scripture.
When I told Father Lopez I was ready to be confirmed, he told me that he would still have to give me an oral exam. I prepared for my exam by reading Fr. John Hardon’s marvelous The Catholic Catechism. I am sorry to report that I got a few answers wrong, and I’m not going to reveal which ones.
For my confirmation Fr. Lopez chose the hospital run by the Hawthorne Dominican Sisters where Flannery O’Connor had been treated unsuccessfully for the lupus that eventually killed her. I chose the confirmation name Thomas. The next morning I went alone to Mass for my First Communion. When Fr. Lopez gave me the Eucharist I forgot to say “Amen.” I went back to my seat wondering if the sacrament really counted. I don’t think Fr. Hardon covered that in his catechism.
The last twenty years have brought many more conversions and miracles. The longer I am Catholic the more I realize that one’s entire life is made up of many conversion experiences. Converts, so to speak, do not have a monopoly on conversion. We are all called to conversion every day. The life of the triune God is infinitely deep, and we are called to journey deeper and deeper into that life. There is no stopping point, there is no final resting point in this life, no comfort zone. Each day offers experiences—whether they are with people, or books, or with nature—through which God speaks. If a convert’s story can spur a reader to listen more closely then the story is worth telling. It’s with this hope that I offer you these glimpses of the sundry events and people who changed my life.